Catholic Online interviewed Roy Spencer last week. Spencer is a climate scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and one of the few climate scientists who is considered a 'sceptic'. Like virtually all climate scientists, he acknowledges that humans are causing some global warming; however, Spencer is one of very few climate scientists who believe the human contribution to global warming is too small to worry about.

In the interview, Spencer repeated a great many long-debunked climate myths, which I have examined individually in a recent blog post at Skeptical Science. It was very disappointing to see a climate scientist respond to simple climate questions with factually and often glaringly wrong answers. It's something you would expect to see from a climate contrarian blogger, but any climate scientist should be able to do much better.

Spencer also made a rather perverse argument about fossil fuels when asked what he would suggest doing if he is wrong and human-caused global warming is a major threat:

"Current solar and wind technologies are too expensive, unreliable, and can only replace a small fraction of our energy needs. Since the economy runs on inexpensive energy, in order to grow the economy we will need to use fossil fuels to create that extra wealth. In other words, we will need to burn even more fossil fuels in order to find replacements for fossil fuels."

That's like telling a smoker that he should solve his addiction by smoking more cigarettes, because they're cheaper and more satisfying than nicotine patches.

Cigarettes may be cheaper than nicotine patches at the store, but they also come with hidden costs from harmful health effects. The same is true of fossil fuels and the damage they cause via both air pollution and climate change. And as with secondhand smoke, innocent bystanders can also be harmed by the consumption of the product. If the costs of that damage are not reflected in the price of the associated products, they are a type of subsidy.

Fossil fuel subsidies

Recently, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) put together a report (PDF) quantifying global fossil fuel subsidies, including indirect costs from climate change damages. They estimated that $480 billion is spent annually on direct fossil fuel subsidies, mostly in developing countries, while an additional $1.4 trillion is spent on indirect subsidies. These include about $800 billion per year in climate change subsidies, and that may be a very conservative estimate.

As an example of these climate costs, consider the 2010 record Russian heat wave. Research has shown that human-caused global warming probably made this heat wave more intense than it otherwise would have been. The heat wave and associated drought crippled the Russian wheat crop that year, which led to a huge increase in global wheat prices. The carbon emissions from fossil fuels likely contributed to that damage.

However, for countries without a price on those carbon emissions (like the USA), consumers did not directly pay for those costs when they bought their coal powered electricity and gasoline, for example. So this fossil fuel energy seemed cheap to folks like Roy Spencer. But those costs didn't disappear. Everyone who paid higher food prices had to pick up the tab.

Climate science research has established that many types of extreme weather will become more intense and occur more frequently due to human-caused climate change, and that's just one way carbon emissions have hidden costs. Things will only get worse for future generations as well. A recent paper found that monthly heat records are now 5 times more likely to happen due to human-caused global warming, and they will become 12 times more frequent by the 2040s if we follow Roy Spencer's advice and continue relying on fossil fuels. Other recent research has shown that global warming is causing more strong hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy.

Cost comparisons

Of course, renewable energy also receives subsidies, so which type of energy is really cheaper? A study published last year by economists Laurie Johnson of the National Resources Defense Council and Chris Hope of Cambridge University sought to answer this question by comparing energy generation costs (not including direct subsidies) while accounting for carbon emissions costs.

They found that wind energy has already become cheaper than coal, even without considering climate damages. Energy from solar panels may also be cheaper than coal, depending on the estimated cost of climate damages, which is still very uncertain. Likewise, wind energy may be cheaper than natural gas, depending on the estimated climate costs.

These findings have also been borne out in real-world projects. In New Mexico, a large 50-megawatt solar panel project is selling its energy at prices cheaper than coal. In Australia, unsubsidised wind is cheaper than natural gas, and solar costs are on par with natural gas. Both are cheaper than coal.

In the United States, there has been no correlation between the amount of renewable energy deployment and electricity rates. I recently documented the example of Kansas, which has rapidly installed wind energy over the past several years. Kansas utilities reported negligible electricity price increases of just 1% to 2% to cover renewable energy investments in 2012 and 2013.

Our choice

In short, it's just plain factually wrong to argue that renewable energy is too expensive, especially when all costs are taken into consideration. It's fossil fuels that really come with the high costs; they're just hidden behind trillions of dollars of annual subsidies.

Right now we're choosing to spend trillions of dollars every year to fund our harmful fossil fuel addiction. We're paying the dealers when we should be paying for rehab.